Extraordinary park in South Korea where everything is shaped like a penis has been inundated with fascinated tourists

An extraordinary park in South Korea where everything is shaped like a penis has been inundated with fascinated tourists visiting the nearby Winter Olympics.

The port city of Sinnam is home to Haesindang Park, better known as 'Penis Park' - a monument to fertility born from a legend about a virgin and a fish.

Even the town's quaint red lighthouse is crafted to look phallic.

A normally obscure attraction, the park is drawing curious crowds of visitors from the nearby Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang just an hour away.

The unusual site features penis totem poles, penis benches and penis wind chimes. There is even a penis-shaped cannon, with a warning to tourists that it should not be mounted.

'I've been all over the world and I've never seen anything like this,' said Keith Childs, a Londoner visiting the park with other people working at the Pyeongchang Olympics.

The legend behind the park has been painstakingly chiselled into a row of stone penises. It tells of a virgin who died in a storm as her boyfriend collected seaweed from a rock in a nearby cove.

According to one version of the legend, the village was unable to catch fish after she died until one fisherman urinated into the sea, somehow satisfying the virgin's spirit.

The fishermen later erected a shrine and a phallus on the cliffs of the village in memory of the deceased.

What may seem bemusing or downright odd in some people's eyes appears less peculiar to South Koreans, who live in a country with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.

The park has grown into a bona fide destination, where dozens of sculpted phalluses stand erect in defiance of an centuries-old folk curse.

Among the 35-member club of mostly rich nations, the OECD, South Korea has the lowest rate.

The country now has several 'penis parks', so many that Haesindang markets itself as the 'only one on the east coast'.

Just 1.17 babies per woman are born each year in South Korea, according to the latest government data, for 2016.

That is set to hit an historic low of 1.04 babies per woman this year, according to a government official.

'Young people face a harsh reality which includes high unemployment rates and an unstable job prospective so individuals choose not to have a child to sustain their own lives,' said Ryu Yang-ji, director at the Presidential Committee on Aging Society and Population Policy.